Sunday, February 26, 2012

Weight Update and a Challenging Week Ahead

Sunday is my weigh-in day for Weight Watchers, which also makes it a good day for sharing progress on my weight-loss journey. I'm pleased to report, so far, so good! My goal is to be down to 180 by my sister's wedding in late April, and if you do a trendline between where I was at the start at February and where I want to be, it's about 2 and a half pounds per week. The blue dots are my actual weigh-ins, which (woo-hoo!) are following the line. My scale also tracks % body fat, which I use to calculate lean weight and fat weight (the red and yellow dots).

As I said, so far so good. Keeping this up, though, is going to be difficult for a couple of reasons. First, there's the simple fact that it gets harder and harder to keep losing the pounds at the same rate. That's nature, though, and nothing much you can do about it except keep at it.

Second, there's a lot going on this week. Monday through Wednesday I'm flying out to South Dakota to visit an operations center, and business trips aren't exactly conducive to watching your calorie intake. You eat out for every meal, most options aren't really all that healthy, the portion sizes are huge, and you usually have a drink or two with dinner. You can try to limit portion sizes, but then you have a lot of food left over, and I hate to waste food (and what's the alternative? take it on the plane back to Richmond?). After the trip, I have a couple of dinners planned with old friends which will mean going out and getting a few drinks in the second half too. So it's going to be a hard week. Hard, but not impossibly hard.

One of the benefits of a hotel is that it comes with a gym, which I can (and intend to) take advantage of. In fact, I've already set up Netflix to have a bunch of sitcoms that I can watch during cardio to make the time go quicker. And I'll be an hour behind, which will make getting up early in the morning to exercise easier, and I can always go at night after dinner. So in theory I can get a lot of physical activity in, which I have a feeling I'm going to need.

Portion control will be harder. First, you have no idea how large the items that you order are actually going to be. Second, judging a 'portion' is difficult and you have very little idea what's actually in it. Third, there's the aversion to wasting food that I mentioned already. And yet even with all this, being smart about what I eat is still the most controllable part of this whole trip.

So, at least for the first part of the week, the mission will be to a) take advantage of the hotel gym and b) be as strong-willed as possible when it comes to food. Definitely thinking that a food-photo-journal might be in order this week to keep me honest.